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Re: [PATCH] Split long strings into paragraphs to ease translation

From: Julian Foad <julianfoad_at_apache.org>
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2018 14:37:30 +0000

Completed (initially) in r1826352. Help strings are split into
paragraphs (at their existing blank lines in fact) across most but not
all 'svn*' command-line tools.

Tracked as issue SVN-4724 "Split long help strings into paragraphs to
ease translation" https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SVN-4724

Now let's see what follow-up we need.

Can you try it and see if it seems to be working, Mattias?

- Julian

Mattias Engdegård wrote:
> Julian Foad wrote:
>> One issue occurs to me. If we make this change, splitting all the long strings into paragraphs, won't that cause one enormous headache to the translators because they will then have a bunch of paragraph-length strings that the translation tools think are untranslated individually, even though translations of them existed as substrings of a previous long string?
>
> Probably, but it's a one-time cost. The old translations will still be in the file as obsolete strings, for reference. And chances are that those strings are currently fuzzy anyway, if the translations haven't been updated for some time.
>
>> How could we ease that transition? It looks like it could be quite easy to write a script that updates the .po files, if we choose our new breaks to be at a deterministic points (e.g. every empty line), and if the current translations keep the same structure (1:1 paragraphs) as the English version. Would that work with most translators' work flows?
>
> Maybe, but it sounds brittle and error-prone, and we may not necessarily want to break at every empty line (the "merge" help, for example, contains lots of ASCII art that may or may not belong with a paragraph of prose). Since we don't know what parts are up to date, we would have to be pessimists and mark them all as fuzzy.
Received on 2018-03-09 15:37:35 CET

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